doiSerbia

Measuring the trust in the European values study and the European social survey

Bešić Miloš (Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade), besicmilos@yahoo.com

In this paper, we compare the latent construct measurement of political and interpersonal trust in two researches: the European Values Study and the European Social Survey. The main goal was to estimate the validity of measuring the respective concepts. In order to achieve this goal, we conducted a number of Principal Component Analyses and Confirmatory Factor Analyses. Additionally, we used multilevel regression modelling to test and compare the effect of socio-demographic variables on political and interpersonal trust in both researches. We identified that socio-demographic predictors had a similar effect on both types of trust. The paper is complemented with descriptive data that portray the differences among countries when it comes to interpersonal and political trust.

Keywords: political trust, interpersonal trust, validity of testing, multilevel analysis, Principal Component analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis